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Livin'
With The Sims
theAntiELVIS explores the wild and wacky world that is Will Wright's The Sims,
asking the inevitable quesiton, "is The Sims the first step toward a virtual
life where everyone is Swedish?"

Vol.
2, Issue 5
December 8, 1999

Now compare
BG to the recent Final Fantasy games. These also take
place on top of static backgrounds, yet take advantage of this fact
by rendering them from all sorts of interesting angles as adventure
games do. FF's environments are also largely non-interactive,
with the occasional button to play with or computer console to operate.
Neither BG nor FF have much of what I'd call a world
simulation at all. Zelda and Ultima IX, on the other
hand, are worlds largely filled with items which operate under learnable
and relatively consistent rules, rather than being mere immovable
window dressing. A burning torch in Zelda can be used to
ignite a stick, which can then light other torches. In Ultima,
the douse spell can put out fires, clearing a path through dangerous
areas. Rocks can be picked up and hurled at enemies in Zelda,
or piled into stacks to help reach high ledges in Ultima.

Creating
an interactive world is just one way to go about making an RPG,
but I happen to think it is the most important direction for RPGs
to go in, and despite the many problems with U9, I really
feel it signifies the future of the genre. Origin may be abandoning
single player games altogether, and based on their results with
Ultima IX, that's probably a very good idea. However, better
developers will continue to make single player-focused RPGs, and
for these developers, Ultima IX is the most important recent
RPG to study, for reasons I'll explore now.

There are
certainly other good games from the last year which are related
to the RPG genre. One of these is System Shock 2, but as
a first person, combat-focused game, I would argue that Shock
really represents a sophisticated kind of shooter rather than an
RPG. Likewise, the Final Fantasy series are coming to increasingly
favor their story development and cut scenes over their basic RPG
elements. With each new release, Square seems to be giving the player
less ability to customize their characters, which I feel is a very
important element in anything RPG-like. Finally, Baldur's Gate,
for all the hype, turns out to be less flexible than the great party-based
RPGs of the past, saddled with non player-created party members
and an annoying combat engine that manages to be neither a good
real time system nor a good phased system.

None of
these games really represent anything new for RPGs. The Final
Fantasy series has been going for years, just adding better
presentation and depth to the basic formula of highly plotted adventure/RPG,
and Baldur's Gate is basically a throwback to what RPGs were
like in the early 90s. What is the basic concept of an RPG on the
computer, anyway? To me, they are all about continually exploring
new and amazing places while increasing your characters' ability
to survive the ever-increasing hardships they will face. Computer
RPGs need to have character growth in terms of the basic game system,
and they definitely need to have combat that manages to stay interesting
throughout the game, and in my opinion they need to have plot. I
think if you take away either the game system character growth or
the combat but keep the plot, you have an adventure game, and if
you take away the plot but keep the other elements, you have a strategy
game. There's nothing wrong with either of these kinds of games,
but they aren't RPGs.